Enhancing Grade towards a Professional Parallel Programming Environment

To provide high-level graphical support for developing message passing programs, an integrated programming environment (GRADE) is being developed. GRADE currently provides tools to construct, execute, debug, monitor and visualise message-passing based parallel programs. GRADE offers the programmer an integrated graphical user interface during the whole life-cycle of program development and provides high-level graphical programming abstraction mechanisms to construct parallel applications. The current version of GRADE can generate C+PVM code but there is no theoretical obstacle to extend it for supporting MPI [11] and FORTRAN. Those new features of the GRADE graphical environment are described in the paper that enhanced GRADE towards a professional parallel programming environment. Introduction. In the framework of the SEPP [24] and HPCTI COPERNICUS projects we have designed, developed and integrated several tools into a consistant, graphical programming environment called GRADE that supports the application programmer to develop parallel programs. GRADE stands for GRaphical Application Development Environment and its major goal is to provide an easy-to-use, integrated set of programming tools for development of general message-passing applications that can run either on supercomputers or on heterogeneous workstation clusters. GRADE's main benefits are as follows: • Visual interface to define all parallel activities in the application (i.e. all process management and communication actions). Graphics help in better understanding of the parallel structure of the code. • Programmers are not required to know the syntax of the underlying message-passing system. GRADE generates all message-passing library calls automatically on the basis of the visual code. • Compilation and distribution of the executables are performed automatically in the heterogeneous environment. • Debugging and monitoring information is related directly back to the user's graphical code during on-line debugging and post-mortem visualisation of the trace file. GRADE currently consists of the following tools as main components: • GRAPNEL (GRAphical NEt Language): A graphical parallel programming language based on the message passing concept [15]. • GRED: A graphical editor to write parallel applications. The editor supports the syntax of GRAPNEL. • GRP2C: A precompiler to produce the C code with PVM [10] function calls from the graphical program. • Tape/PVM: A monitoring tool to generate a trace file during execution of a PVM application [18] (developed independently at LMC-IMAG, Grenoble, France). • DDBG: A distributed debugger [6]. • PROVE: A visualisation tool to analyse and interpret the trace file information and present them to the programmer graphically. The scheme of the program development cycle in GRADE is depicted in Figure 1. Different software tools that comprise the system are denoted by rectangles (GRED, DDBG, etc.). Ovals represent data files used by GRADE. As a first step the user applies the GRED graphical editor to design and construct the parallel program written in a special visual programming language called GRAPNEL. The GRED editor creates the so-called GRP file from the GRAPNEL program. The GRP * MTA-MSZKI Research Institute for Measurement and Computing Techniques of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, P.O.Box 49, H-1525 Budapest, Hungary, e-mail: {kacsuk, dozsa, rlovas, fadgyas}@sunserv.kfki.hu